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In a new series of specially written pieces for readers
and viewers of MRCTV, we will be looking at some of the biggest and
most controversial issues of our time, stripping away the
day-to-day "us versus them" surface images, and getting down to
important facts, history, and principles that you can carry with
you. Published on Nov 8, 2018

#2A
https://www.mrctv.org/blog/beneath-ve... In this second part of
our deeper look at the "Gun Control" arguments, we study the
wording of the US Constitution, and explore what the Founders
believed about the right keep and bear arms.

Intellectual Ammunition Pt 3: Armed with Logic and A
Mistake by SCOTUS.

Contemporary political issues come at us so rapidly,
it’s easy to get lost in the polar, “us versus them” impulse, so we
at MRCTV have decided to take certain hot-button issues and peel
away the veneer, to expose or derive the long-standing facts,
history, and principles beneath the ever-changing winds of
political expediency.

We begin with the popular euphemism “gun control”, which
is a dangerous misnomer and actually attacks history, morals,
ethics, and facts. We hope you enjoy these extended explorations,
and find them very valuable...

"Gun Control."

The term itself is prejudiced, and doesn’t allow for
honest debate. It frames things within the comforting notion of
“control”.

So, for example, protesters and politicians hold rallies
calling for “sensible gun control”. We’ve seen it with the March
for Our Lives rallies begun by a group of students from Parkland,
Florida. They received mountains of attention and nary a worthwhile
question from the dinosaur leftist pop media, and the ideological
approach was that those who “oppose” their so-called “sensible” or
“common sense” gun “controls” are cold-hearted, likely bigoted,
reckless troglodytes who simply don’t understand”:

The glowing, safer future that society will achieve if
their “reasonable” gun “control” statutes are applied to you and
your family, and,

The dangers guns and “gun culture” pose to innocent
people.

But let’s study these in practical terms before
analyzing them on deeper, long-standing principled
levels.

Erroneous Assumption One: Gun Statutes Lower Violent
Crime

First, the “gun control” argument assumes that
“firearm-limiting” statutes actually work to stop school attacks
and violent crime. As I noted recently for MRCTV, anti-gunners such
as Dianne Feinstein conveniently overlook the fact that school
shooters intent on breaking the statutes against harming others are
– shock – not stopped by other statutes prohibiting legal ownership
of guns or ammo, or dictating useless and often
dangerous-to-civilians “waiting periods”. As I observed when
Feinstein spuriously implied that gun prohibitions would stop
school shootings:

(G)un control laws and law ‘enforcement’ did not prevent
many of the worst school shootings, such as the attack on students
in Newtown Connecticut, and the attack on students in Parkland,
Florida, and egregiously anti-rights gun restrictions didn’t stop a
shooting a few months ago in her own neck of the woods near DC,
Great Mills High School, in Maryland.

Stephen Paddock, the man identified as the shooter who
killed nearly 60 people in Las Vegas on October 1, 2017, broke the
law by modifying his weapons prior to breaking the law by shooting
dozens of unarmed people.

Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, the murderers of a dozen
students and one teacher at Columbine High, in Jefferson County,
Colorado in 1999, violated at least seventeen specifically
gun-related statutes, along with many more non-firearm-related
laws. The statutes did not prevent them from entering a “gun-free
zone” and committing mass slaughter of unarmed
victims.

Despite numerous warnings, statutory “authorities”
failed to stop Omar Mateen from using firearms to kill 49 people at
the Pulse nightclub in Orlando, Florida, in 2016.

And those are just in the United States. As Eric Pratt
noted in a 2017 USA Today Op-Ed:

France has far more gun control than we do. They
have greater restrictions on semiautomatic “assault weapons,” which
are falsely labeled as such by newspapers like USA TODAY. Yet all
the gun ownership restrictions in France did not stop terrorists
from murdering 130 people at a concert in 2015.

And beyond the anecdotal, one sees a more profound
international pattern: gun “bans” don’t make guns or violence
disappear, in fact, they leave innocent people defenseless, and
spark increases in violent crime.

As I noted for MRCTV in February of 2018, contrary to
the claims of pop media swamis, violent crime actually increased in
Australia for three years following its vaunted 1996 gun “ban” and
mandatory “buy-back”. This spike included an increase in
gun-related violent crime, and the violent crime did not return to
1996 levels until more than ten years later, when many civilians
had resorted to the black market to rearm themselves.

And, as I observed in the same article, violent crime,
including homicides and gun-related violent crime, increased in the
UK following its government “banning” most firearms in
1997.

As Ryan McMacken writes for the Mises Institute, despite
highly restrictive gun “control” laws imposed in 1972, Ireland saw
an increasing homicide rate per 100,000 through 2014, nearly
doubling what it was at the time the magical unicorn of the “gun
ban” statute was passed.

A similar result was seen in Canada after the Canadian
government instituted gun “control” in the 1960s. Observes
McMacken:

Canada enjoyed very low homicide rates during the 1950s
and 1960s. However, from 1967 to 1977, the homicide rate
nearly doubled from 1.66 per 100,000 to 3.0 per 100,000. This
decade of growth in homicide rates followed the 1969 bill "C-150"
which created new categories of restricted and prohibited firearms,
while granting police the power to "pre-emptively" seize privately
owned firearms from persons who were deemed a danger to society by
the state.

Erroneous Assumption Two: “More Firearms” Lead to More
Violent Crime

Paralleling that reality about the failure of “gun
control” to decrease violent crime is the fact that gun “control”
advocates are incorrect to think that more guns in the hands of
civilians leads to more crime.

A CDC study of fifteen states (which was conveniently
“disappeared” by the CDC for years until researcher Gary Kleck
discovered it) showed that armed civilians use firearms multiple
times more often to stop crimes than to engage in them. In fact, as
Kleck determined, the multiple is about 3.6 times more
often.

Civilians also stop criminals more often than police do.
As police will tell you, they usually arrive after a criminal has
committed a crime. Police are not the true “first responders”.
That’s a dangerous myth that needs to be expunged from the
contemporary lexicon, but it will hang on, because politicians and
pop media people adore it.

And armed civilians are safer than police. They harm
five times fewer people with firearms than do armed police
officers. As Rob Morse writes for Ammoland:

The trained law enforcement officer is over five times
more likely to shoot the wrong person than a concealed permit
holders, 11 percent versus 2 percent.

In fact, police are convicted of gun crimes more often
than concealed carry permit holders.

And when more peace-minded civilians own guns,
especially concealed-carry guns, violent crime drops.

As John Lott noted in his groundbreaking book, “More
Guns, Less Crime”, “waiting periods” have shown no benefits in
reducing crime. (In fact, they have prevented some at-risk
individuals from obtaining guns to defend themselves.) He also has
noted that a woman caught in a violent assault is 2.5 times more
likely to be injured when offering no resistance than if she
resists with a firearm.

And Lott observes that in comparable and neighboring US
counties, those that allowed for more concealed carry firearms saw
sharp declines in violent crime compared to those that did not.
Criminals change their behavior to avoid confronting armed
citizens. Lott has also noted in a recent study:

Between 2007 and 2014, murder rates have fallen from 5.6
to 4.2 (preliminary estimates) per 100,000. This represents a 25%
drop in the murder rate at the same time that the percentage of the
adult population with permits soared by 156%. Overall violent crime
also fell by 25 percent over that period of time. -- States with
the largest increase in permits have seen the largest relative
drops in murder rates.

The FBI’s Uniform Crime Statistics chart shows that
while gun purchases were skyrocketing in the US between 2007 and
2011, violent crime was dropping like an apple on Newton’s
head.

Why? Because criminals change their behavior when
thinking about armed civilians. Indeed, as I observed in my book,
“Live Free or Die”, the “hot burglary” rate (where thieves simply
break in without “casing” a house) in England is much higher than
in the US, and interviews with criminals routinely indicate that
they case houses to avoid armed residents.

And, finally, what is one of the biggest practical
fallacies of “gun control”?

Fallacy Three: Prohibition Works

This is simple. As the experience of the United States
during the “Prohibition Era” has shown, statutes don’t stop people
from obtaining the things they demand. I teach economics, and this
is an economic axiom. Let’s not fool ourselves into thinking that
if the zones of “prohibition” are widened beyond the
crime-ridden-yet-gun-banning cities like Chicago and DC, and
applied to all of the US this will stop criminally minded people
from obtaining firearms. Prohibition doesn’t work.

But this does not stop gun-grabbers from pushing their
proposals, or even misreading the US Constitution to justify their
threats to curtail your inherent right to
self-defense.

And in our next installment, we will study their
baseless arguments, providing you with essential constitutional
information with which to combat their proposals, at any
time.

In the first part of this series designed to offer
deeper, longer-standing intellectual ammunition for visitors to
MRCTV, we looked at many of the popular political myths associated
with the deceptively euphemistic term “Gun Control”. Now, we study
the supposed rulebook for the federal government, the US
Constitution, analyze the “constitutional” arguments of those who
push gun restrictions, and see what the people of the Founding era
believed about the right to keep and bear arms.

Many pushers of gun “control” don’t mention amending the
US Constitution. Instead, they “read” the very clear,
deliberatively written, wording of the document to mean what they
want it to mean.

But the Second Amendment is clear:

A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the
security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear
Arms, shall not be infringed.

Anyone who has read pretty much anything about what the
Founders believed at the time knows that the Militia was not the
“National Guard”, it was all male citizens of gun-bearing age, and
the final clause, “the right to keep and bear arms shall not be
infringed” is the action clause, strictly prohibiting any
government – be it federal, state, county, or local – from imposing
any statutory impediment on the right of an individual to acquire,
own, sell, or use a weapon – any weapon -- for defensive
purposes.

This concept goes back to Aristotle, who believed in the
inherent Natural Right of people to fight oppressive government and
who greatly influenced the Founders. 350 years B.C, he
said:

Those who possess and can wield arms are in a position
to decide whether the constitution is to continue or
not.

Aristotle’s implication is that despotism lies in the
hands of agents of the states when they wield weapons against
unarmed citizens.

Indeed, as the brilliant author, Dr. R.J. Rummel,
observed in his books, “Death by Government”, and “Power Kills”,
governments of all stripes have slaughtered six times as many of
their own people in the past 100 years as have died in all the wars
of that period -- combined.

So perhaps Aristotle was on to something…

It turns out, he was. And many of the greatest thinkers
who influenced the writing of the so-called “rules” of the US
Constitution offered the same principled thoughts supporting the
inherent right of an individual to defend himself or
herself.

The great Roman teacher Cicero said:

There exists a law inborn in our hearts that if our
lives are endangered by plots or violence or armed robbers or
enemies, any and every method of protecting ourselves is morally
right.

James Madison, the man who took the best-known notes on
the Constitutional Convention, wrote:

The advantage of being armed, which the Americans
possess over the people of almost every other nation, forms a
barrier against the enterprise of ambition. Kingdoms of Europe are
afraid to trust the people with arms.

False is the idea of utility that sacrifices a thousand
real advantages for one imaginary or trifling inconvenience; that
would take fire from men because it burns, and water because one
may drown in it… The Laws that forbid the carrying of arms are laws
of such a nature. They disarm those who are neither inclined nor
determined to commit crimes.

George Mason said:

To disarm people is the best and most effectual way to
enslave them.

And Thomas Paine wrote:

The supposed quietude of a good man allures the
roughian… while, on the other hand, arms, like laws, discourage and
keep the invader and plunderer in awe and preserve
order.

The first battle of the American Revolution, the “Shot
Heard ‘Round the World” came at Lexington, Massachusetts, and
rolled on to Concord, MA – specifically because the British
military was trying to colonial guns. For some bizarre reason, the
colonists didn’t comply with the government commands.

Good thing. Human history is clear on the disastrous
effects of civilian disarmament. Just recall:

Lenin and Stalin, starting in 1918, seized firearms in
Soviet Russia as the first step towards multi-nation property
seizure, incarceration of dissidents, suppression of free speech,
forced relocation, and a command-and-control system that saw tens
of millions die during their regimes alone.

Hitler used a pre-Nazi German gun registration law to
target firearm owners and seize guns, leading to results similar to
those instituted in Soviet Russia and its captive
nations.

Mao followed Lenin, Stalin, and Hitler, leading to the
extermination of between 60 and 120 million people.

And many, many more.

In her voluminous book, “To Keep and Bear Arms: The
Origins of an Anglo-Saxon Right”, Professor Joyce Lee Malcolm
stated:

The Second Amendment was meant to accomplish two
distinct goals. First, it was to guarantee an individual’s right to
have arms for self-defense… These privately owned guns were meant
to serve a larger purpose as well. The customary American militia
necessitated an armed public, the militia (being) the body of the
people. The argument that today’s National Guardsman, members of a
select militia, would constitute the only persons entitled to keep
and bear arms has no historical foundation.

Wise words to remember as we hear the “gun control”
pushers claim that the Founders wanted to see the members of a
government military have sole possession of arms.

As Antonin Scalia wrote about the Second Amendment in
his opinion for the majority in the 2007 “District of Columbia v
Heller” decision:

The operative clause’s text and history demonstrate that
it connotes an individual right to keep and bear arms.

Of course, we don’t need Scalia or anyone else to
explain this. It’s simple logic. Rights are inherent to
individuals, and groups are just assemblages of individuals. Each
person has his own right to self-defense. In fact, even putting the
question to agents of the state, as conservative as Justice Scalia
was, leaves our rights open to threats.

When we conclude this series on “gun control”, we will
look more closely at the “Heller” decision, and see why it’s not as
praise-worthy as some imagine, what language was slipped in at the
very end to make it actually a very dangerous decision for
gun-rights advocates, and why, logically, people who want safer
societies should want more firearms in civilian hands.

Intellectual Ammunition Pt 3: Armed With Logic and A
Mistake by SCOTUS

In this series, we strip away the flimsy veneer of
contemporary political rhetoric, and offer long-standing
principles, facts, and syllogisms to let you carry something with
you.

Thus far, we have explored the upper layer of the “gun
control” issue, that being the rhetoric and supposed “practical”
arguments offered as so-called justification to infringe on the
individual right to keep and bear arms. We also looked at what the
Founders believed when they wrote the Second Amendment, which is
supposed to prohibit any government from doing anything to infringe
on your right to keep and bear arms.

Now, let’s approach the issue logically, and
ask:

“Who engages in threats of gun violence, the civilian
who owns, or attempts to own, a firearm, or the civilian or
politician intent on passing ‘gun control’ statutes?”

To address this, we ask a further series of
questions.

First. Is ownership of an object an aggressive act?
Clearly, the answer is “no.” By simply owning something, a person
is not engaging in aggressive violence or threats of violence
against another human being.

Second. Does ownership connote intent? This is
important, and goes towards one’s civil treatment of his neighbors
in all things. Although we might think we can guess as to why
someone has procured something, we cannot assume for another why he
or she acquired it. All valuation and reasons for human action are
subjective – self-driven – and to assume for another why he or she
did something is conceited and arrogant, breaching the walls of
civility and the Golden Rule. Someone may have purchased scissors,
and one might assume he or she is going to use them to cut
something, but would that be for cutting a person, for an
aggressive act? Perhaps the scissors are for an art display or a
theatrical production, to be a prop.

Even if one were to assume for his neighbor the reasons
he or she had for procuring an item like a firearm, as we’ve noted
in the past, a suppressed Centers for Disease Control study showed
that Americans use firearms far more often to stop crimes than to
engage in them – 3.6 times more often. So, by the collectivists’
standard -- that of assuming they can tell you what to own or not
own -- if they want a safer nation-state, they should want the
government to mandate that everyone own a gun.

Given that possession is not a violent act, and
possession does not connote intent, one must ask, for what are gun
“control” advocates calling when they call for “gun
laws”?

They are calling for statutes that will threaten people
with penalties if they procure firearms or ammo, sell firearms or
ammo, or possess them in ways the state proscribes. If a citizen
should breach those prohibitions, the gun “controllers” want the
state to punish them. This requires armed agents of the state to
enforce the statutes.

The logical conclusion is that promoters of “gun
control” employ threats of gun violence against innocent,
non-violent people. This is irrefutable and axiomatic.

And what of the idea that, practically, passing gun
statutes will make areas safer? In Part One of this series, we
looked at the real-world numbers on that question, but here is a
logical argument to pose to gun-grabbers.

Suppose you are in a paintball game. You have a
paintball gun, and you will win $10,000 if you enter one of three
houses and, in five minutes, hit ten people with pellets. If you
get hit by a pellet, you will have to pay $200,000… There are forty
people in each house. In House One, you know that there is no one
with a paintball gun. In House Two, you know that there are a few
people with paintball guns, and in House Three, you know that there
are many, many people with paintball guns.

Which house would you choose?

The answer is obvious. Let’s not be foolish about
pretending that we would choose anything other than House
One.

The logic of self-protection through firearm possession
and use is irrefutable. The statistics of it are clear. The history
of despots disarming citizens prior to destroying their lives is
also clear, as is the history of what the Founders thought when
they wrote the Second Amendment.

The right to keep and bear arms shall not be
infringed.

But the “interpretation” of this prohibition against
agents of the state passing laws to attenuate your right is left in
the hands of…

Agents of the state.

Recall in Part Two of this series when we mentioned that
one of the most important cases in the US Supreme Court to affirm
the individual right to keep and bear arms being protected by the
Second Amendment was the 2007 DC v Heller case?

I mentioned that Justice Antonin Scalia, often a hero
for conservatives, and a man seen as a “strict constructionist”
made a grievous error when he concluded his majority decision. For
over sixty pages, he cited contemporaneous accounts from the
Founders to prove that the Second Amendment protected an individual
right, not a “group” right. That was fine, though he could have
simply used logic to show that the term right is associated with
the individual, is inherent, and that the term “group” is just a
word applied to a group of individuals, just a term with no
personal meaning at all. A “group” is always reducible to the
individuals therein, and they retain their rights.

But Scalia did something else that calls for more
critical attention. At the conclusion of the majority decision in
Heller, he noted that, indeed, the right to keep and bear arms is
an individual right, but:

Like most rights, the right secured by the Second
Amendment is not unlimited.

This is an egregious and blatant attack on the very
concept and definition of the word “rights”. Rights are supposed to
be unassailable. The term is derived from Old English and Old
Germanic to mean “right-handedness” and “what is proper”, and the
very basis of it is that it pertains to self-ownership and a set of
innate, natural “freedoms from” state or person-on-person
infringement.

In speaking with Richard Heller, the defendant in the
case, I learned that many people believe Justice Scalia added the
last few pages of the opinion -- the pages in which he utterly
eviscerates the very meaning of the word “right” – as a bargaining
tool to get one more vote in favor of the “individual”
interpretation and in favor of the defendant.

If this was the case, it’s an indication of just how
tenuous one’s hold is over his own inherent rights when those
rights are put under the “protection group” of the state. And, in
fact, Scalia’s terrible final words on the ruling are being used
today to crush peoples’ rights.

As a result, I believe it is important for many of us to
remember that attacks on our rights come from many directions. It’s
important for individuals to gather information they can use to
defend themselves against such attacks. And it is intellectually
satisfying, as well.

Thank you for reading this series on “gun control”. I
hope you’ve found it intellectually worthwhile, as
well.

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